Advertising and data

Advertising strategies have changed a great deal in the data-driven modern world, demanding high-quality data.

Advertising has long been used to attract new customers and ensure that the advertising campaigns of one's rivals don't take away the customers one already has. So if your company's campaign stresses how your product makes one's clothes or teeth "white than white" this may result in a loss of my company's customers as people vote with their feet and decide they would rather have white clothes or teeth rather than the "sparkling" clothes or teeth which my business's products offer in our ads for our own marketing and sales campaign.

The importance of data

Traditionally marketers will have gone out and talked to housewives or people in a dentist's waiting room with a marketing survey questionnaire in hand whose goal would be to try to figure out whether the customers prefer their clothes or teeth to be white or sparkling, and base their advertising campaign on the results of these surveys, analysed manually by said marketers back in the office.

They would then have had to decide where to focus the campaign, perhaps allocating 40% of the budget to television and radio ads, 30% to magazine and newspaper ads and the other 20% to other avenues such as billboards.

While many advertisers nowadays also include Facebook, Twitter, Google and other online outlets in their ad campaigns, the biggest change in the last few years has been the increasing importance of data in driving advertising campaigns. Google is happy to allow potential advertisers access to some of their data through Google Trends so that they reveal that the term "sparkling white" is much more popular than the term "whiter than white" among those who use their search engine to search for these two terms among many others. This or similar information may be of critical importance for the advertising department of companies which produce washing powder or toothpaste.

Getting the data to work effectively

Yet any medium or large company with a successful website will have a great deal of data, much of it dark data (whose value is poorly understood by its owners) which, if properly analysed, can give a great deal more information than can be obtained by sending out teams of market surveyors to stand on the High Street or enter dentist's waiting rooms and try to find out the opinions of passers-by about toothpaste or washing powder, and asking questions such as whether the price or the quality of the product is more important for them when making a decision as to which washing powder to buy. Or when it comes to trying to sell luxury items such as beer, cakes or expensive lingerie, whether consumers are willing to spend their money at all on these products or whether they would rather spend their excess cash on a yearly holiday to Spain, manicures or perhaps going to support their local football team.

There is no doubt that giants such as Facebook and Google base their whole business model on the data they have about their users and those users preferences in order to sell the data they have gathered to advertisers or simply to ensure that ads are personalized or targetted so people interested in football get ads to suit their tastes which are very different from those users who have a passion for international travel or for fine wines.

Smaller companies may mistakenly think that they cannot emulate the likes of Google and Facebook and therefore make no attempt to exploit their own data to utilize them to maximum effect in their new ad campaign. This is a mistake that could cost them lost customers, lost revenue and ultimately their business, especially if their similar-sized rivals are exploiting their own data better in this area.

The key to exploiting these data is to ensure that they are data quality which you and your advertising team can trust, to bring the best results for your business while ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction. Nobody doubts the critical importance of advertising but too many businesses fail to grasp the importance of having that clean, quality data which is the key to both devising and implementing any successful ad campaign in 2017.

This is where Spotless Data come in, with a unique browseable data quality API solution to ensure that the data being used by your advertising department is consistent and accurate 100% of the time based on real insights into what your customers and potential customers desire and/or require, as well as ensuring that the execution of the campaign goes smoothly with accurate and real-time feedback as to how the campaign is going, based on ongoing data, such as responses to the campaign including shifts in sales based on the campaign. While clean data is no substitute for a brilliant ad idea flawlessly executed when both you and your rivals have access to clean, high-quality data, the best advertising department in the world will suffer and struggle if the data is not right and will fail against an inferior team with inferior ideas if those inferior ideas and employees have the better quality data to work with.

Spotless is giving away 100Mb of free data cleaning so you can try our service and see how well it actually works. We guarantee that your data remain secure and not available to any 3rd parties during the time they are in Spotless care, recognising that these data are worth a great deal of money, time and investment to you. If there are issues with the data an automated flag alerts the Spotless data science team who then review the issue manually and, if necessary, contact you via your log-in details to discuss the problem.

Here is a quick link to our FAQ. You can also check out our range of subscription packages and pricing. If you would like to contact us you can speak to one of our team by pressing on the white square icon with a smile within a blue circle, which you can find in the bottom right-hand corner of any of the web pages on our site.

If your data quality is an issue or you know that you have known sources of dirty data but your files are just too big, and the problems too numerous to be able to fix manually please do log in and try now